(July 28, 2015 at 10:24 am)Pyrrho Wrote: I don't think you have that quite right. It is not just that "science explains more about how the universe works and is better for making predictions about it than God is," it is that science actually provides some explanations and predictions, whereas God explains nothing.
Saying "God did it" is not an explanation; it is a pseudo explanation, a fake explanation, because it explains nothing at all. It is merely pretending to have an explanation. Take the rainbow, for example. Saying "God did it" does not explain it at all.
That's fair. I wasn't trying to imply that Goddidit is a valid alternative to evidence.
(July 28, 2015 at 10:35 am)lkingpinl Wrote: You state the universe had an origin which gets us to the Kalam argument. We've all heard it before so I won't get in to it. I find it too often that people reject an explanation from agency when it comes to the universe, but logic dictates that it must be so in order to answer the why question.
Actually, logic doesn't dictate an agent. That's just one solution to the problem; one theists find more satisfactory than atheists. It takes a bunch of things we know and bridges the gap by saying "so, there must exists a cause that exists outside of time". The problem is, we don't even know if it's possible for things to exist outside of time. We've never observed it. It's not a "logical necessity" so much as a hand wave.
Take an "alternative" I'm making up on the fly for illustration: We'll start with the same list of facts, and I'll fill the gap by saying "so, it must be true that causality doesn't work like we think it does at the 'beginning' of time.".
See? It "works". It solves the problem with something I spun up out of whole cloth. The only difference is, it doesn't fit neatly into a theistic world view.
